Meet Elvis Presley Handwriting Expert, Rich Consola

Rich Consola of Amherst saw Elvis Presley in concert twice at Memorial Auditorium, in 1957 and in 1976.

That was it.

And yet “The King” has been Consola’s focus for decades.

“I’ve studied Elvis Presley’s autograph every day of my life for the past 25 years,” Consola said.

Through sheer will, untold hours of study, and the gift of being “kind of OCD,” Consola has become an internationally respected authenticator of Elvis’ signature, assessing the loops and swoops to pick out the genuine from the counterfeit.

Not that Elvis has made that easy.

“He signed a lot of autographs, but the thing about Elvis is that he almost never signed his name twice the same way,” said Consola, a trim, gray-haired man who has two Elvis tattoos on his right arm, one the image of a famous photo from the 1957 Aud concert by former Buffalo News photographer Robert L. Smith, the other Elvis’ own “TCB” design, which stands for “taking care of business.”

Consola loves to talk about Elvis, and he doesn’t confine his conversation to the thousands of scraps of paper, tickets, records and programs that Elvis signed in his 42 years. Once a prolific collector himself, Consola has sold or swapped almost all of the artifacts he ever owned, including two of only seven known Elvis letters. Consola’s contacts in the field of Elvis memorabilia run wide and deep. He knows the stories behind the Elvis artifacts he once owned, as well as the more valuable items that, as a 47-year court reporter, he never had a shot at buying.

“This is a candid photo of Elvis from 1956, when he went back to Tupelo, Miss., where he was born, for his first performance. This was taken by a girl in the front row. This is a classic 1950s autograph, and for girls, at that time, he would sign, “Yours,” and for a guy who never signed his name the same, the “yours,” almost always looked exactly the same, identical. He finished the O in ‘yours’ with a line that went through the letter, and he did that almost all the time. In this one, the two names are all connected.” VERDICT: Authentic and early.


But most of all, Consola knows Elvis’ handwriting, how Elvis shaped the opening E, how he looped the terminal Y, how he signed every check “E.A. Presley,” how he sometimes wrote his first and last names as two words and sometimes didn’t raise the pen from the paper so the signature looks like one 12-letter word. And with that knowledge comes a mission.

Consola is inspired by a zeal to keep forgeries off the market, a drive to feel close to the star whose music was the soundtrack of his life, and his admitted “fascination with handwriting.”

Consola’s expertise is valuable “because he is such a specialist on Elvis,” said Joe Orlando, president of PSA/DNA, a division of Collectors Universe, one of the leading authentication and grading services in the world. “If our full-time authenticators are looking at an Elvis autograph and they’d like another opinion, they can reach out to Rich.”

One of his early purchases was a handwritten letter a fan received from Graceland, probably in the early 1960s, signed with Elvis’ name. “I didn’t know his handwriting that well,” Consola said. As he studied the letter, he began to suspect that it was a “secretarial,” written by a friend or assistant.

Secretarials are just one type of fake signature, and they can come with convincing stories. Consola once was asked to authenticate an Elvis signature that was accompanied by a letter from the manager of the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, on hotel stationery, saying that he got the autograph for the fan.

Consola immediately judged the autograph a fake, but he thinks there was no ill intent. The hotel manager “obviously gave it to one of Elvis’ workers, and they came back with it,” he said, a common occurrence. “The key question is, did you see the person sign it?”

“This is the letter I once owned. Look at the bubble Y, Elvis never bubbled his writing out. I didn’t have a lot of samples back then, but when I looked at this writing, thinking about Elvis Presley and his personality, this is a curvy, curly writing, which in my mind looks like it would have been written by a female rather than a male. She did a decent job of copying his signature. The E is left out of the end of his name.” VERDICT: A secretarial, written and signed by a friend or employee of Elvis.

“I just took a fascination with handwriting.” And knowing that he could collect opened a new world to him. “It got into my blood to collect the real autographs of people, and Elvis was always in the forefront. But my desire was also to make sure that things were real. In my 47 years as a court reporter, I heard a lot of lies.”


The possibility of riches has attracted sophisticated criminal forgers. In 1999, Consola played a role in thwarting an international forgery ring that was trying to sell faked handwritten copies of Elvis lyrics, he said. “Keeping forgeries off the market has been a goal of mine, because they hurt the real collectors,” he said.

Is it difficult to authenticate the signature of a man who wrote only seven known letters, almost all from his days as a lonely soldier in the Army?

“Yes, it can be,” said Consola. “There are some pretty good forgeries. I have things I look for, because your handwriting is your handwriting. You can’t change that much. We see hurried ones when somebody might have handed him something to sign and he might have been leaning over, but it’s just a matter of knowing the idiosyncracies of his handwriting.”

Consola said he can tell whether a signature is authentic 99 percent of the time.
Very occasionally, he said, “You do get on the fence and can’t tell. When that happens, I just ask, ‘Would I take the money out of my own pocket and buy this?’ I know that autographs now can go from $1,200 or $1,700 to more now. Usually when I’m on the fence, my answer is no, I wouldn’t buy it. My answer about an autograph has to be that it’s real, without a question.”

Consola also is known in the world of Elvis collectors for the key role he played in getting Robert L. Smith credit – and royalties – for the photo he took at the Aud in 1957 of Elvis on his toes, guitar slung back, the image Consola has tattooed on his arm. Consola spotted the image on merchandise at Graceland, then brought Smith there to prove that he had taken the photo, which had been published in The Buffalo Evening News but at Graceland was marked “photographer unknown.”


Source: Buffalo News